The Monstrefact: The Boneless of Ravenloft

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses another monster from the Ravenloft setting of Dungeons and Dragons: The Boneless…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
Last week on The Monster Fact, in a fit of
enthusiasm for the release of Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft The
Horrors Within, I discussed several of the creatures included in

(00:33):
the book's bestiary. This week, I want to focus on
just one. It is the Boneless. These creatures were also
in the last Ravenloft supplement and I believe date back
to the second edition of the game, but I missed
them when I was a D and D obsessed youth.
I didn't get into these particular creatures until the fifth edition.
But I've already used these guys on multiple occasions and

(00:56):
games that I've hosted, and I have several of the
Little Whiz Kids minis on hand. I want to hold
one up here for those of you who have video. Yeah,
these are a lot of fun to throw at your players.
What are they? Well, you can kind of think of
them as pancake zombies. They're reanimated humanoid corpses, but just

(01:17):
the skin, and they crawl around like grotesque animate rugs,
sliding under doorways, and of course they are eager to
pounce or drop or slide up onto unsuspecting player characters
to smother them to death. They're generally considered the result
of a flayed humanoid the skin then coming to life,

(01:38):
or otherwise being reanimated by, say a necromancer, but we
might also imagine this being due to the outer fleshy
dermal layers of a corpse slouching off, perhaps slouching off
of a bloated sea zombie. This is an idea that
I find quite attractive in D and D because we
also have stats for a sea zombie, so you can

(01:58):
have one reanimated body becoming two enemies. Always fun when
that happens. The Horrors Within and previous D and D
materials also suggest that a boneless could be the result
of a body simply being flattened by something, so keep
that in mind for future encounters. Your players happen to
drop something heavy on some zombies, well, now they have

(02:19):
to fight some boneless, you know that sort of thing.
For natural world comparisons, the boneless always bring to mind
creatures such as rays flounders, both of them have skeletons
in this case though, and are therefore not boneless, as
well as flat worms, which are indeed boneless. But the
ick factor of the boneless in Dungeons and Dragons is

(02:41):
that what was once part of someone is now an independent,
animate undead, and it feels even more detached when it
is the skin compared to say, ahead Now, when it
comes to folkloric and mythological parallels, we have a pretty
direct one in the book Spirits Feare Marries, Leprechauns and
Goblins by folkloris Carol rose I often refer to this

(03:04):
or another of her books. She lists the boneless as
an entity tied to the traditions of Oxfordshire, England. She
describes it as a quote clammy white, stinking, shapeless mass
that haunts lonely country lanes, moving along the ground to
eventually overtake and engulf doomed travelers. She connects it to

(03:26):
various traditions of shapeless or amorphous spirits in the British Isles,
and of course we see shades of this tradition around
the world, such as the shapeless putrid yokai in Japanese
traditions known as the New Peppo. I've covered the New
Peppo on the monster fact before. You can check that
out in the archives. To be clear, it is not flat,
but it is amorphous and gross and strange smelling. And

(03:51):
in many of these cases we have a lot of
different influences to draw on, but one could be the
smell of putrid flesh, and observations of putrid flesh, either
the flesh of humans or certainly flesh of animals, could
be tied to traditions of butchering and so forth. I
turned to another source as well. In nineteen seventy six's
Encyclopedia of Fairies Folkloris, Catherine Mary Briggs goes into a

(04:14):
bit more detail about traditions of the boneless, describing it
as one of the mini spirits chronicled by sixteenth century
English politician and author Reginald Scott, and that while Scott
provided little info, it was quote one of those formless
things whose chief function it was to terrify travelers or
children in their bed. She mentions a story as well,

(04:36):
from nineteen sixteen of a pedler encountering the boneless on
a lonesome road, as well as a more recent account
of a policeman encountering the spirit. I'm going to share
this story that she relates here. I would do want
to mention that she uses the word as summit or
quotes the word summit. This just means something. Quote he

(04:56):
told her. It was darksome over above putcham Rode, and
the tide was in far below. He could hear it
playing down two hillfields, and then his lamp lit up
a white summit across the road. It weren't fog, it
were alive, kind of wooly, like a cloud or a
wet sheep. And it slid up and all over him

(05:17):
on his bike and was gone, rolling and bowling and
stretching out and in up the Perry Farm road. It
was so sudden he didn't fall off. But he says
it was like a wet, heavy blanket, and so terrible
cold and smelled stale. So while the D and D
version of the boneless is a reanimated flayed skin or

(05:38):
a flat Stanley zombie, that doesn't seem to be a
part of the actual tradition here. Based on the description
quoted by Briggs and certainly as well as how Rose
describes it. There seems no actual connection to a flayed
skin human or animal, rather to just some manner of
a morphous, crawling entity that could in some case be

(06:00):
compared to some sort of hide. Naturally, some cryptid enthusiasts
have really taken to this tale. They try to imagine
what sort of real life animal it could be, perhaps
some sort of large and vertebrate. But I think the
clear answer lies in the nebulous world of the fearful imagination,
something that crawls across the ground like a cast's shadow,

(06:21):
but is composed of strange flesh that desires to envelop us.
Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster Fact, the
Artifact or Animalius Dependium each week. As always, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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